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frugality.  She had one set of silverware!
    That same frugality—or
was it an attempt to stay mobile, to enable a quick, overnight exit?  The idea
wormed its way into my head.  The proverbial signs were there.  Giving Clarence
and myself a fake name.  A shortlist of necessary living items.  The separation
from her husband.  Was she running from something?  From someone?
    Would she have run into my arms, given enough time for her to realize what an amazing life we would’ve
had together?
    Simply, yes.
    The cabinets contained
a small number of pots and pans.  The sink held a dirty dinner plate, smeared
with ketchup swipes and swirls indicative of someone that liked to have it in a
puddle instead of drizzled over her french fries.
    A dirty plate left to
be cleaned later.  A life left unfinished. 
    It’s a concept that has
always bothered me—the minutes before the end.
    Earlier that evening,
as she’d dipped a fry into the ketchup, she couldn’t have known that she would
be dead soon.
    Or what about the guy
crossing the street who gets hit by a distracted driver?  What was he doing? 
Where was he going?  Who’ll miss him?
    Or the woman that trips
over her dog and falls down her stairs, breaking her neck in the process?  Who
was she on the phone with?  What were they talking about?  What song was on the
stereo?  Did she like it?  Was she on her way to change the station?
    Abrupt endings leave
too much room for speculation about what was , and what could’ve been . 
    It was just their time to
go?  Bullshit.
    It was just Kerry’s
time to go?  Bullshit.
    In the minutes leading
up to the abrupt ending of my marriage, before the question, “Steve, would you
like to tell me about the thong I found in the backseat of your car?” I had
been teaching Smoke how to draw a bunny.
    Half of a pink bunny
left incomplete on a white sheet of construction paper.  A life left
unfinished.
    It’s the denial of
resolution that bothers me.  For this reason, I never start a jigsaw puzzle.  I
don’t read a book I can’t finish in one sitting.  I run the same, one-mile loop
around our block eight times so I don’t have to cross the street.  Just in
case, because what if?
    It’s a quirk that
Shayna found intolerable, but I was working on it.  Not for her sake, but for
Kerry’s.  I couldn’t risk the fact that it might bother her, as well.
    “ Be the victor ,”
remember?
    One single item in the
entire kitchen stood out as a glimpse into Kerry’s past.
    A framed photo, of she
and Clarence, sat on an uncluttered countertop.  Kerry in a silly, glittery,
cone-shaped Happy Birthday! hat and Clarence in his stupid, ragged,
rumpled suit.  She smiled around a party horn held up to her lips; the kind
that toot and unravel when you blow.  She looked happy.
    Clarence—he smiled,
too, but something was off about the look in his eyes.  It’s hard to say what
it was exactly, but the feeling I got was something like…I don’t know…gloom?
    Like when you show up
to a parent-teacher conference, uninvited, and Mrs. Carson asks you to leave
because the tension is making the other parents uncomfortable, and you smile
and say, “It’s no problem, I understand.”
    I didn’t care about
Clarence and his melancholy.  Not at the time.
    I used a paper towel—to
avoid fingerprints because there was no need to give the inevitable, inept
investigation probable cause—and flipped the picture frame over, face down.
    Upstairs, in the spare
bedroom, I found six cardboard boxes.  Three of them were empty.  The others
contained clothing items, shoes (including a gorgeous pair of Louboutin pumps
that must have cost her—or Clarence—a small fortune, similar to the pair
Johanna wore on The Night of Betrayal) and books such as Losing a Loved One , How to Let Go , and Surviving the After .
    I should have realized
these were my first clue.
    Before you get the
wrong idea—I’m not a scumbag.  You’re probably wondering why I